Bizarre yet grounded, this book about a male stripper makes for a playful look at the human experience.
A debut novel explores a stranger’s adventures in a surreal land.
The tale of Pozzo begins in a garage situated near an unpaved alley. It is there that two boys dressed as angels and an “impressively large, but not fat, drag queen version of Mae West” wind up conjuring a wondrous creature. After the boys pray and Mae, as she is known, sings a rendition of the Chordettes’ “Mr. Sandman” (accompanied by her drag queen backup singers), a man emerges from a cardboard box. He will become known as Pozzo. Strong, protected by an invisible guardian rabbit, and given to a clunky, anachronistic mode of speaking (as when he explains his dismay at having a guardian rabbit: “I have no understanding that allows for an incorporation of such a guardian”), he is adrift, but not helpless. Taken home by Mae, he forms a close bond with her, though friction develops. While Mae makes her living as a drag artist, Pozzo begins to fear he is dead weight in the relationship (“He had even overheard himself referred to as Mae’s toy boy”). As the decision is made that Pozzo too will perform for money, he winds up blossoming into an incredibly successful male stripper. When he eventually leaves Mae for the potential of even brighter pastures, the only question is just where he might wind up. Peppered with philosophical considerations (a paragraph on Kant includes his concept of “noumena”), offbeat scenes (a conversation between a private investigator and his billy goat assistant results in many “Baa, baa” responses), and a plethora of singing (song lyrics included), the story is decidedly whimsical and dreamlike. Part Rocky Horror Picture Show-style camp, part earnest exploration of what it means to exist, Johnson’s tale takes the reader on a weird though not impossible journey. Broken up into three digestible parts and coming in at under 300 pages, the entire adventure moves just as quickly and confoundedly as a lively floor show. Whether or not readers will take to the mixture of the goofy and the ruminative depends on their tolerance for creatures of many stripes and lots and lots of singing.
Bizarre yet grounded, this book about a male stripper makes for a playful look at the human experience.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5347-0435-0
Page Count: 248
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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